The Last Vampire in New England

“Mercy Brown’s stone in the Exeter Historical Cemetery #22 on Chestnut Hill, once called Shrub Hill.”

Can
the dead commit a crime?

Until
the late 19th century, residents of New England thought so, given the trail of corpses
that littered local communities from Massachusetts to Vermont. Gaunt, wasted,
afflicted by bloody, painful symptoms, victims often included entire families
and bloodlines, particularly in rural areas. Before microbiology and modern
medicine, there was only one explanation for these deaths that satisfied the
locals.

Because
consumption seemed to feast upon the life force of its victims, it made sense
that some invisible (or at least elusive) agent was at work. Absent any other
identifiable culprit, rumor and superstition turned to the dead, and to
supernatural beings whose hunger could not be sated. D’Agostino:

“The
New England vampire was deemed the victim of a mystical force that made him
return from the dead to feed on the living. The families knew, of course, that
the dead were not actually digging themselves out of the grave each night and
physically attacking their prey. They concluded that the spirit of the deceased
was rising from the tomb and making its way to the bedchambers of his kin,
sucking the life out of them in order to nourish the physical body that lay in
repose. Many of the sick complained of how the deceased family member sat on a
part of their body, causing great pain and suffering…”

The
most famous case of all time involved one Edwin Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island (an
area known as a hotbed for cases of alleged vampirism), who had already seen
the disease claim his mother and two sisters in the early 1880s. With Edwin
deathly ill from consumption, according to local tradition the path to
treatment first involved a gruesome means of diagnostic: the exhumation of the
deceased, and the examination of their decayed heart and liver for any
remaining traces of fresh blood. From there, the remedy typically involved
cremating those organs and then feeding them to the patient in a tincture.

Edwin’s
sister Mercy had been the last to die, so according to protocol, she was next
in line. In 1892, then, a local physician, Dr. Harold Metcalfe, performed the
autopsy, exhuming Mercy’s body from the Keep—an aboveground burial chamber in
which corpses were kept overwinter (while the ground was still too frozen to pierce
with shovels).

“Looking at the Keep from the Brown burial plot. This is where Mercy was being held pending proper burial following the spring thaw.”

In
1892, the deed was done. Not long afterwards, the
actual cause (and vaccine) for tuberculosis would be found, but the Browns’
story didn’t end there. For the grisly details—for what happened to Edwin, and
for the full story of what Metcalfe found deep in Exeter Historical Cemetery
#22—you’ll have to read D’Agostino’s book. But suffice to say that thereafter Mercy
was known as the last documented vampire in New England, and even became the
inspiration for stories by none other than H.P. Lovecraft and the godfather of vampires
everywhere, Bram Stoker.

What
more do you need to know?

“A rare view of the inside of the Keep at Chestnut Hill Cemetery. The entrance has been bricked up and the door welded shut. Photo courtesy of Christopher Martin of www.quahog.org.”